The Belfast Notebooks traces a poet’s journey deep into a country where “the wine tastes of jasmine and history” as it evokes layers of violence, memory, and community. Ranging across Northern Ireland through Italy, Spain, Morocco, and back home to Maine, these poems from Jeffrey Thomson’s fifth full-length collection engage myth and classical art just as easily as they riff on rock music and street murals. The...
The Belfast Notebooks traces a poet’s journey deep into a country where “the wine tastes of jasmine and history” as it evokes layers of violence, memory, and community. Ranging across Northern Ireland through Italy, Spain, Morocco, and back home to Maine, these poems from Jeffrey Thomson’s fifth full-length collection engage myth and classical art just as easily as they riff on rock music and street murals. They are raucous and rowdy and love a good pint. Full of the history everyone knows and the legends no one speaks, this book feels at once intimate and sweeping, personal and limitless, written by a citizen of the wounded city where the scar of memory lingers and is healed.
The weave of the writing is seamless, the vision moving, the stakes nothing short of how we can live together.
Christian Barter
Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and is the author of multiple books including the memoir fragile, the poetry collection Birdwatching in Wartime, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and the edited collection From the Fishouse. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.
